User blog:Toph's Fanboy/A Creative, Moderate Approach to The Economy
I will begin this blog post by saying that I don't support any of the current economic systems (free-market capitalist, Marxist-socialist, or Keneysian featuring most prominently in my mind), because they all have their flaws. I try to analyze each with the least amount of bias as possible, and try to figure out how to eliminate their problems and combine their best points into one logically coherent system. I will now proceed to explain where I think current economic theory as a whole has gone wrong. The common assumption amongst modern people when it comes to economics, from free market capitalists to the most radical of Marxists, is that an individual finds it necessary to build up a stock of supplies for their own survival before they are able to divide their labors up into anything else, and that therefore their capabilities are ultimately defined by their material situation. What this does not properly take into account, is the fact that organisms always ultimately devote their energy into ensuring the continuity of future generations with their own gene pool through reproduction; driven by instinct, animals are often quite willing to expend prodigal amounts of energy into laborious mating rituals, even if it is at risk to their own survival as individual organisms. Humans differ not by orientation towards life, but by the lack of ultimate instinctual restrictions on how we might expend our energy to achieve this ultimate goal, and thus our capabilities are beyond the capacity of our economic situations to fully define. In other words, the division of human labor is prior to the build-up of a stock and is necessary for this build-up to ever take place, though the acquisition of said stock is ultimately also needed for the organization of this labor to take place and for the requirements of the ongoing survival of human life to be sufficiently met thereby. Labor is conditioned by incentives, but not completely defined by them. This theory is based on the fact that Adam Smith changed the initial focus on the build up of wealth from the division of labor to the accumulation of stocks midway through the book, according to my copy of The Wealth of Nations at least, seemingly to funnell economic development back into agriculture and away from industrial civilization in order to theoretically preserve the members of the nation artificially against the build-up of wealth in an ad hoc manner. This socialistic tendency left his theory unnecessarily open to the (in)famous Marxist critique in The Communist Manifesto (which was required reading at my college, unlike Adam Smith's book which I had to choose to read for myself), which claimed that all division of labor was economically determined by the build-up of a communal stock, which therefore pitted the "have-nots" in endless war against the "haves", and all quite unnecessarily. This background gave rise to the superstitious ideology of the labor theory of value (the idea that one is robbed if one cannot afford the results of one's labor) which to lead to the vicious wage-interest spiral as its natural consequence: the unions lobbying for higher pay against the business owners to accumlate wealth for the workers, causing the businesses to hike up the prices of their products so that they could keep making a similar profit, decreasing the relative value of the laborer's pay and thus decreasing their demand for the supply of products relative to their demand for more pay, eventually causing the supreme irony of a market crash due to inflation that characterized the Great Depression. From these circumstances, came the ridiculous half-breed known as Kenyesian economics, where the socialist's desire to accumulate wealth for the lower class was co-opted via government hand-outs for the purpose of funneling their demand for the products of the corporations, suffocating the potential of both classes in the process with the taxes to accumulate the money "necessary" to re-interest the laboring consumers in the products of business in a pseudo-Fascistic manner (given its unlimited trust in the state's ability to define the totality of the state's interests better than the parts themselves which is also the key quality of all Fascist governments). Because of these flaws in the current approaches to the economy, my suggestion is that corporations be made to pay the consequences if they fall below a certain minimal stock-laborer ratio by which the common motive amongst the laborers and the business owners to divide one's labor in a way which preserves life (rather than their divisive economic interests) and thus the need for co-operation rather than coercion to create business are emphasized, the minimal amount being determined experimental study as to the overall cosmopolitan benefits produced thereby, beyond which corporations and labor unions have complete freedom to interact as they please. This should be done through voluntary political associations (by picketing the businesses which don't meet the quota, and similar non-violent forms of activity), but secondarily through raising a small percentage upon the businesses which don't meet the quota, with the amount of money gleaned off of these taxes is paid towards the national debt . If a tax is imposed, it should be small and set in stone legally; however, the quota itself should be open to the results of experimental study as to what amount of extra workers works best beyond the minimum amount the business hire out of their short-term interest in acquiring the greatest amount of money possible at the least price to themselves. Simultaneously, taxes should be reduced or eliminated overall for all levels of the economy, but more so in the corporate sector than elsewhere, the stand-alone "stock-laborer ratio" tax being the sole exception to this overall taxing restructure. I fully admit that this is not quite the "invisible hand" of Adam Smith which was to direct all the workings of the economy, but it has the benefit for conservatives of removing the coercive tendencies of Adam Smith's refocusing of economic development on the accumulation of wealth which leads to revolution and counter-revolution in pursuit of pig-eyed aristocratic fantasies, by giving the inclusion of the laborer's interests alongside their own short-term interests cash value to business owners in the long run and tightening the social glue which holds society together thereby (and thus eliminating the "invisible hand-wringing" of Adam Smith's variety of capitalism in the process). The biggest difficult of pursuing my creative, moderate economic policy is the difficulty of calculating the proper ratio and the proper relative tax rates which would produce the best overall benefit. I am more of a political theorist than I am a policy maker, and it would be preferrable that more practical-minded people be made aware of the benefits of this ideology who would be more able to figuring out ways of calculating the needed quantiies and putting the theory into practice. So I figured it would be best to make both conservatives and liberals aware of the possible overall benefits of the theory's application for society by promoting it on websites such as this. Please leave your opinions, positive or negative, in the "Comments" section below. Category:Blog posts